Winter's touch -Review Winter's Bone

So I just finished watching this movie called “Winter’s Bone” and now I’m feeling writery (not a word, but I like it). It was an odd movie about a 17 years-old girl who is in charge of taking care of the family which includes her mute mother and her two younger siblings. They live in a redneck sort of town either up North (where they have southern accents for some reason) or the northern part of the South (because the weather is cold and getting colder throughout the movie).

The story focuses on the family’s missing father, Jessup, who put the house up as payment for bail. He has a court appearance in a few days and if he doesn’t show up, the family loses the house. The house is all this young girl and her family has for a home, so she sets off on a mission to find her father to make sure he shows up to court. This hunt, however, turns out to be more dangerous than anyone in the town would want to get involved in and the deeper she digs the deeper she starts to dig her own grave.

But the mission is a must if she is to keep her family together. With the help of some neighbors, family, friends and even some enemies, she finds her dad and there is a bittersweet ending. While the movie falls a little flat of raising the sense of danger for our 17 year-old heron (somehow you just know that she is going to be okay no matter who’s threatening her), the lead actress’s tough, yet innocents, demeanor trains us to feel what she is feelings. If she is feeling brave and confident, then we the audience feel brave and confident. If she is rattled or worried, then we are rattled or worried. If she feels numb or pain, we feel the same.

The actress, whose name is Jennifer Lawrence by the way, will probably (and should) receive high remarks and praise for her work. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see an Oscar nomination. It’s just that type of work that gets actress’s attention and helps them build a promising career.

But my feelings after viewing this movie are light. Meaning, good. I don’t feel sad for the family or the characters, although there is merit in feeling that way. Without giving away the ending, I will say that our heron finds her dad in a way you wouldn’t want to find your parent. When she does discover him, she has already come to terms with the result. Meaning there was nothing left to do, but do what needed to be done to help her family.

While she does shed tears for her father (how could she not) she Sally Forth’s with her duty knowing that there is little to nothing left to do to help her dad in this moment. She is forced to face a challenge will beyond the years of a 17 year-old in order to do the right thing for her family.

It’s that strength in her that I see in myself. It reminds me of when I lived in Chicago and I was her, taking care of my family against the sour spoils of our environment. Sure, I wasn’t 17 nor was I raising two younger siblings. But I certain could relate to playing the hand that’s dealt to you and getting over the bullshit really soon.

So what I lost my mother when I was 5. So what I found my father’s dead body on his bedroom floor at 21. So what I wasn’t born rich. I was handed a deck of cards and simply told to deal with them. I didn’t seek pity on those with a better hand, but I certainly didn’t settle for the lesser hand I was dealt.

It took bravery, courage, fear, fight and uncertainly for me to keep moving out of the place I was at. While I’m still pulling myself up and still trying to get a better hand to play the game of life with, I am not turning over my cards and expecting someone to pick them up and play them for me. I still have to do this myself.

This reminds me that I haven’t been thankful enough. I really haven’t been thanking God aka My Spiritual-Self enough for all that they have giving me. I have a wonderful life that is getting better and better and so I have nothing to fear. Everything is a turning point and I still have the chance to make choices that will deal me the right cards.

Earlier I was feeling bad about money and I didn’t want too. Something had happened earlier which now prevented from going to the movies to see a movie I desperately wanted to see. So I was stuck staying home and renting. “Winter’s Bone” was the movie I rented. Now I’m feeling better about money because now I see I didn’t need it like I thought I did.

Sometimes it’s hard to see how full of wealth you are because you’re looking at the wrong thing. I watched this movie on a $600 TV that I got myself last year because I wanted it. I worked hard enough to afford and because I did, I’m happy with what I did for me.
Success isn’t measured in money, but how happy you are. Money is just a sweet piece of cherry that comes with happiness, sometimes, but not all the time. What I felt after viewing “Winter’s Bone” is that money buys very pieces of happiness, but it helps bring us closer to the things that make us happy.
At the end of the movie our heron is given a large sum of money due to the hard work she put in just to keep the house. She needed to keep the house to keep her family. She didn’t go out looking for her money; she went looking for her daddy. When she did go looking for money in the movie she found that it would be much harder to get than it would be than finding her daddy.
All in all this was a satisfying movie. I didn’t cry (would have liked too), but I didn’t walk away feeling cheater. I’d become use to seeing movies like this where the end is less than satisfying. While I can’t think of any now I would say my beef with movies like these come from bio-pics in while the main character dies or is killed in the end. I guess because that didn’t happen in this movie I feel like I was served justice.
This movie made me feel more grateful, without being a heart-warming family movie. It was just the right about movie discipline in order to tell a tough story and still have you walk away like you didn’t miss anything. Like all your questions got answered. Basically, you paid for a show and you got one.

"The Social Network" effect

So I went to see the new movie, “The Social Network,” today and I found it to be a rather good movie. It’s a movie not about the scandalous thought process behind the world phenomenon of Facebook and how it was built to destroy the minds of millions. It’s a movie about a kid who got pissed off after being dumped one night, wrote a blog trashing his ex-girlfriend and her family’s name (and bra size), posted it on his schools private “Facebook,” while creating another website in which he compares women’s looks to one another and sent out a link all over the school for all to vote and humilate.

The film grew to be something much bigger than that. It tells the story of a socially awkward genius who takes the seed of an idea and injects hormones into it that makes the seed better and stronger than it originally was. Problem is that’s sort of illegal and this kid manages to piss two different parties off at the same time and gets sued (separately) by both.

The movie was a great piece of work. It doesn’t make you feel guilty about being on Facebook, in fact, it makes you glad that someone had the foresight to see what a brilliant idea this was and wanted to share it with the world, and not just the Harvard asshole elite (which was the orignal purpose).

“The Social Network” is the story of the single signature social change of our generation. The movie shows why Facebook beat out other websites like MySpace -which was set to take over a nation before Facebook came along- as the biggest thing to hit our generation since the internet itself. The movie doesn’t make using Facebook look bad or it’s creators. It simply tells how A became C without bias.

But this blog isn’t about this great movie (which I really want to see again), it’s about how I felt after the movie: depressed. There was a sad subtext in the movie that was beautifully express through the lead actor’s, Jesse Eisenberg, brilliant performance: money doesn’t equal happiness.

For the past few month’s I’ve been trying to win the lottery in order to get more money in order to not have to worry about money. I want to win so I’ll be financially secure for a while and buy that dream home I’d been wanting and go on that dream vacation. I also wanted to quit one of my jobs so I could devote more time to writing and finishing my book.

Since I started this little dream I have done the following: quit one of my jobs and finished my book. Although I have not yet won the money, I have done two of the things I most wanted to do and I’m very happy with that. I’m glad I’m finished writing all the chapters of my book, though I have a lot of editing to do, the hurled has been conquered.

However, I find myself depressed because I'm single. I thought it was due to the fact that I'm not winning the lottery, but I realize that winning the lottery will probably only keep me lonely. I had decided to stop dating to focus on my writing and keep myself from getting distracted from my work. Now that I'm finished I'm ready to get back out there, but finding love is harder than finding a publisher.

As I start my search I use my old tried and not so true method of online dating. As I jumped back into the dating pool I am reminded of just how cold it is. Although I know it’s true what my former boss use to say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and expecting a different result, I have not learned my lesson.

After being on a few dating sites for less than a week I feel discouraged and disappointed with the results. But that's how I am. I get bored with the whole dating business easily and want to change my mind almost before I've given myself a chance at love. Perhaps, I could be bipolar. My mood changes so much that I hate making decision because I’m not 100% sure I’ll stick with it 5 minutes later.


But for some reason, after viewing this movie, I’m left with this depression feeling. The feeling of not knowing at all what I wanted to do once I was done with the movie made it worst. I was supposed to have had a date, but I guess I wasn’t what he wanted, so I’m stuck again wondering what’s wrong with me.

Rejection, failure, loneness, all these things makes for one difficult Saturday night. I might get up later and dance or workout, but the reality of my circumstances won’t change. See that’s the thing that sucks about feeling like this: temporary fixes. I can write, read, dance, workout, pump myself up to believe that things aren’t bad, but even I know it’s just a phase.

I’m probably PMSing, I’ve been masturbating like a man for the past week and I’m still very cranky. I could have hooked up and fucked a dude this weekend, but I know I’d just regret it later. I could go to McDonald’s and blow my money on fatty foods knowing that I’ll just regret it later because that’s what I do. I know this routine, unfortunately I don’t know how to win it.

Writing helps. I’ll be at work all day tomorrow and that kind of blows, but it’s also where I need to be. I need to be out of this depressing house, even for 21 hours, just to pretend I’m normal in my head. There are so many things I should be doing, but I’m not because I’m depressed. I need to get back on my birth control pills because they were helping.

I’ve written all I can write now. I’m gonna try to read something and drift off to my dream life. Maybe I’ll get happy enough to get me to the next page or able to watch a little television. Whatever I do, I just hope it’s not suicide.